This the land of the free and the home of the brave has not only created a culture of violence but fueled it to unimaginable heights where the above article is not so much the tip of the ice berg but will not even rate a minor foot note in any historical archive of the war on drugs as it the Mexican chapter is written.

This is not a home grown war that grew out of native initiative. The depth of violence is largely a product of weapons and training from the USA to both sides of the war. You can see this in the history of the gangs and forces organized to fight them. Case in point is the MS-13 Mara Salvatrucha (commonly abbreviated as MS, Mara, and MS-13) which grew out of the violence in El Salvador in the 1980s. Large members of them were trained by the US forces that trained the El Salvadoran army.

There is another chapter in the training and arming of the assorted drug cartels by the DEA. There are stories writen and legonds talked about of DEA training groups of soldiers and national police that have defected to this and that gang. Then there is the Department of Justice efforts to arm them with such operations as ATF gunwalking scandal.

This is a violence that is seeping across the borders with Mexico and is finding expression in the US. I have seen the violence first hand in Central and South America and there is nothing in the American psyche to prepare them to deal with it when it explodes into the daily culture of North America.

However, as sad as the situation may be, it is not the product of Latin America but the core of the problem and issue rests in the bankrupt culture of North America. It is a culture that has money but no sense of life and mission. Drugs are an escape for those with meaningless lives. Yes, the logic of justification for transcending life into higher planes is nothing more than twisted logic to justify escaping meaningless lives.

Our jails and prisons are filled with the necessary but disposable middlemen and women with a 6th grade education and addictions. These are the middlemen and women that connect the drug cartels and pharmaceutical industries with those that have the disposable income who think it is their right to use illegal drugs for recreation in a responsible manner.

The community leaders, politicians and law enforcement community would have it no other way. To change any part of the North American drug culture would send an economic tsunami through the nation that would put millions of men and women who have invested their lives in either combating or promoting the culture into poverty.

On the side are those babies born of women in prison that come into the world both trusting and willing to learn that have a 70 percent chance of going to prison themselves. Not because they are evil or bad but because they were born into a situation where community leaders, politicians and law enforcement did not care enough but to stoke their own wellbeing.